What brought down Phobos-Grunt?

Jan 19, 2012

Andrei Kislyakov

specially for RIR

The cause of the Phobos-Grunt failure lies not in the stars, or in U.S. radars, but within the Russian scientific community.

Specialists from Russia’s space agency Roskosmos have not
managed to determine the cause of the problem that resulted in the failure of
the Phobos-Grunt Mars mission, but Nikolai Rodionov, former chief of the
central spacecraft office in the Soviet defense ministry has an answer. He
believes that radiation from U.S. radars could have caused the failure.

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“The trajectory of the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft lay within the
operating range of powerful U.S. radars deployed in Alaska,” Rodionov said in
an interview with Interfax news service. “I’m afraid the powerful
electromagnetic radiation of those sites may have affected the control system
of our interplanetary probe.”

Rodionov blames the failure on the American HAARP research
facility, which is partially located in Alaska. HAARP, an ionospheric research
program servicing the U.S. Air Force, is run by the Phillips Laboratory and
subordinate signal processing and weapons laboratories of the U.S. Air Force
space technology center. HAARP was originally designed to ensure continuous
communications with submarines; Nicholas Christofilos, a physicist with
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proposed using extreme low frequency
waves generated by electrojets – electric currents that occur in the ionosphere
– as a way to communicate with submarines. Now HAARP focuses on studying the
ionosphere, which significantly affects the quality of radio communications,
especially via satellite constellations.

The scope of the project, in conjunction with generous
financing, has caused numerous rumors and myths about HAARP, most speculating
that the program is part of the U.S. weather weapon system. HAARP is, indeed,
capable of fully disrupting nautical and air navigation in a selected area,
blocking radio communications and radio location, disabling on-board
electronics of space vehicles, missiles, aircraft and earth-based systems.

Many Russian officials and military brass blame many natural
calamities on HAARP. Tatiana Astrakhankina, a former Duma deputy, has been
quoted as saying: “The catastrophic flood in Germany, France and the Czech
Republic, tornadoes near the Italian coast, which had never witnessed tornadoes
before, are nothing but the results of U.S. geophysical weapons tests.” In
2002, the Defense Committee created a table showing the adverse climate impact
of the HAARP tests of ionosphere and magnetosphere modifications.

There is still no plausible proof of these effects. Moreover,
Russian scientists believe the energy radiated by the facility is negligible
compared to the energy the ionosphere receives from solar radiation and storm
discharges. The disturbance in the ionosphere cased by the HAARP radiation
disappears very fast – as soon as the HAARP action stops. There are no serious
scientific grounds for possible use of HAARP as an instrument to eliminate all
types of weapons, power grids, pipelines, manipulate the weather, and induce
mass psychotropic effects.

Vladimir Kuznetsov, Director of the Pushkov Institute of Earth
magnetism, ionosphere and radio propagation under the Russian Academy of
Sciences, said that there was no weather weapon yet. “Tests are run to study
the key mechanisms of nature in near space that can be used to manage the
geophysical environment; however, these mechanisms are of global scope.”

The scientist also denies the rumors of HAARP’s implication in
modern natural calamities and maintains that the objective of the program is to
study the interaction between radio emissions and the ionosphere. Kuznetsov
believes Americans can use HAARP to disperse GPS and mobile communication
signals – but the effect stops as soon as the facility stops operating.

In late November, in a comment on the development of the space
industry, President Dmitry Medvedev said: “we need to promote our products on
international markets and create high-quality samples.”

It must be in the quality of the work performed by our
spacecraft developers that the solution to the Phobos mystery lies, rather than
in plots by HAARP lab “masterminds.”